Departmental Procurement

Gareth Thomas: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many contracts his Department has awarded directly to third sector organisations in each month since May 2010; what the value was of such contracts; and if he will make a statement.

Chris Grayling: The numbers and values of contracts awarded to third sector organisations since May 2010 are detailed in the following table:
	
		
			  Contracts awarded Total value (£) 
			 May 2010 3 569,421 
			 June 2010 1 25,000 
			 July 2010 0 0 
			 August 2010 2 229,185 
			 September 2010 4 2,031,629 
			 October( )2010(1) 25 265,677,775 
			 November 2010 1 69,090 
			 December 2010 0 0 
			 January 2011 3 1,116,590 
			 February 2011 0 0 
			 March 2011 0 0 
			 April 2011 6 226,325 
			 May 2011 0 0 
			 June 2011 2 96,920,210 
			 July 2011 0 0 
			 August 2011 0 0 
			 September 2011 0 0 
			 Total 47 366,865,225 
			 (1) Including 20 Workchoice contracts. Notes: 1. DWP does not have complete coverage of the third sector status of every supplier who has been awarded a contract in this period. 2. We have 15 other contracts in the period where the supplier's third sector status is unknown. 3. DWP awarded 1,129 contracts in total in this period (of which, CIT low level contracts total 598). Third sector suppliers represent 4.1% of the overall total. 4. The data includes DWP and its NDPB's. 5. The data is extracted from the BMO Contracts database using the contract start date as the filter. 6. Some contracts have a nil value because there is no firm contractual commitment to spend. 7. The period covered by this response is 1 May 2010 to 30 September 2011.